Let’s disappoint those hungry for military interventions in 2014 too

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

As reported by antiwar.com, US Senators John McCain and Tim
Kaine have unveiled a bill to the Congress that would change the
legal status of the United States in starting future wars across
the world.

The bill aims to repeal the 1973 War Powers Act, which was
intended to limit the power of the president to take the US to
war without Congressional approval. The Act has been widely
ignored by a succession of presidents, but now, if McCain and
Kaine get their way, it would be scrapped altogether and replaced
by a law which requires greater ‘consultation’ with Congress and
a vote within 30 days of any ‘significant’ conflict. But
crucially, the bill makes an exception for ‘humanitarian’
missions and covert operations.

"The Constitution gives the power to declare war to the
Congress, but Congress has not formally declared war since June
1942, even though our nation has been involved in dozens of
military actions of one scale or another since that time,"
McCain said. "There is a reason for this: the nature of war
is changing."

In 2013 McCain urged President Obama to consider bombing Syria
without Congressional approval and his new initiative must be
seen in this context. What the US really needs is for presidents
to abide by the 1973 War Powers Act- not its abolition, which is
what the uber-hawk McCain is proposing. McCain’s and Kaine’s bill
comes after a year of setback for those keen on western military
interventions.

Ten years ago, in January 2004, US military corporations and
their lobbyists and supporters in political establishment might
have looked back at the previous 12 months with great
satisfaction. The war against Iraq, which they had long lobbied
for, had finally happened. True, the US-led invasion had not been
the cakewalk they predicted, and true, no WMDs had been found-
despite this being the reason the war lobby gave for attacking
Iraq, but what did that matter? Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath
Party had been forcibly removed from power- and a long-standing
strategic goal had been achieved.

Fast forward to January 2014 and it’s a very different story. The
past 12 months have been a real annus horribilis for those in the
US who strive for war. Last year they must have been hopeful that
they’d get the US to commit to strikes on Syria, which would lead
to a conflict embroiling Iran and giving the West the pretext to
launch strikes against the Islamic Republic.

“There are times when the president of the United States has
to act in the national interest and that clashes with my view
[that] we are a nation of laws, governed by the Constitution and
the separation of powers,” said John McCain as he urged
President Obama to consider bombing Syria without Congressional
approval.

But the same September US-led military action in Syria was
averted due to skillful Russian diplomacy and widespread public
opposition to intervention in Western countries. To the horror of
the war lobby, President Assad and the Ba'ath party are not only
still in power at the start of 2014, but the Syrian Arab Army has
pushed back the rebels. The ‘regime change’ in Damascus that they
are so desperate for hasn't happened and doesn‘t look likely to
happen any time soon. Worse still for the ‘liberal
interventionists’, the US/UK establishment now seems to be slowly
shifting its position on Syria- in December it was announced that
the US and UK was to end all ‘non-lethal’ support for rebels in
the north of the country.

The vast majority of people in the US and Britain were of course
relieved that war with Syria was averted. But American hawks were
furious that US-led military action did not occur. In a joint
statement with fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, John
McCain denounced the Russian/American agreement on Syria’s
chemical weapons as “an act of provocative weakness on
America's part." Neocon columnists joined in the
Obama-bashing. In the Weekly Standard, neoconservative political
commentator William Kristol said the US president had
been inspired by Marx- not the German philosopher Karl, but the
American comedian Groucho.

“Less than three weeks after Bashar al-Assad gassed his
citizens, Obama let us know he was glad to have come before us to
share his outrage, explained that of course he couldn’t stay, and
went off to the United Nations with his partner in comedy,
Vladimir Putin,” Kristol declared.

“By throwing the ball to Congress and then to Russia, Obama
has effectively taken the use of force off the table, letting the
Russians and Assad set the ground rules. From a moral and
geopolitical standpoint, this is a debacle that will extend
throughout the Middle East and beyond", claimed Jennifer
Rubin, in the Washington Post.

In Britain, Labour leader Ed Miliband, whose party voted against
the government in the crucial Parliamentary vote, was also
singled out for the attack over Syria.

The public were blamed too for not supporting war- with
historian Andrew Roberts criticizing the “hideous, amoral
selfishness” of “new Britain.”

“All too often, we see on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, a new
generation who want Britain to become just another minor power
that watches events from the sidelines: another Norway, Japan,
Sweden or Ireland….Welcome to the most morally vacuous,
pusillanimous and self-indulgent generation for half a
millennium,” he ranted.

Government Minister Michael Gove was just as angry, screeching
“You’re a disgrace” at MPs who voted against
intervention.

It wasn’t just their failure to get direct US-led military action
against Syria which upset the war lobby in 2013. There was also
the rapprochement with Iran. American neocons were appalled that
the Islamic Republic, under its new President, was coming ‘in
from the cold‘ and in November their worst nightmare came true
with a historic nuclear deal being agreed with Iran, which
greatly reduces the chances of any western military strikes
against the country, at least in the near future.

John Bolton, US Ambassador to the UN under
George W. Bush, who despite his pro-war views rejects the label
‘neoconservative‘, called the agreement “an abject
surrender.” and concluded “an Israeli military strike is
the only way to avoid Tehran’s otherwise inevitable march to
nuclear weapons, and the proliferation that will surely
follow.”

“In truth, it’s not a deal in the usual meaning of the term.
It’s an accommodation. It’s a way for the Obama administration to
avoid confronting Iran,”bemoaned American political analyst and a
regular commentator for Fox News William Kristol.

Journalist Bret Stephens writing in the Wall Street Journal claimed that deal wasn’t
another Munich: it was actually worse than the notorious
agreement that handed Hitler the Sudentenland in 1938.

“If you hear echoes of the 1930s in the capitulation at
Geneva, it's because the West is being led by the same sort of
men, minus the umbrellas,” he claimed.

Across the Atlantic, British journalist Melanie Phillips, who
earlier in the year advocated “neutralizing” Iran on
national television, and who called the British Question Time audience
“incredibly ignorant.” for not sharing her views on the
“threat” to Britain from the Islamic Republic, labeled
the deal a “capitulation” to the “terrorist and
genocidal Iranian regime.” In a piece entitled ‘World
saved? Hardly. More a final countdown to nuclear blackmail and
war’, Phillips fumed that the deal “all but guarantees
that the principal source of terrorism in the world today will
now develop nuclear weapons for its monstrous purposes.”

While we cannot write them off completely - given their level of
representation in the US and UK mainstream media and in the
national legislatures, which is wildly disproportionate to the
level of public support they have – there is no disguising the
fact that supporters of ‘humanitarian interventions' from
politics and media are in a much weaker position than 12 months
ago.

It’s much, much harder to sell foreign ‘interventions’ to the
public now – in an age of austerity –than it was in 2003. People
across the Western world have had enough of being tricked into
costly wars, on the basis of claims which later were proved to
have been false, like the ones that Iraq possessed WMDs in 2003.

Moreover in the US and UK a split has developed between neocons
and ‘liberal interventionists’ and other members of the political
establishment in those countries who prefer diplomacy to war and
who support a ‘realist’ foreign policy position based on an
acknowledgement that we no longer live in a unipolar world.

Those who are hungry for more military interventions didn’t get
what they wanted in 2013 and their frustration is there for all
to see. The people who have brought so much death and destruction to Iraq, have been trying to
emotionally blackmail us over Syria claiming that the truly awful
refugee crisis is caused by ‘non-intervention’ and is a result of
the west ‘doing nothing’.

But in fact the Syrian conflict has become so protracted because
the West and its regional allies have already intervened – by
arming, funding and supporting ‘rebel’ groups dedicated to the
violent overthrow of the government. Instead of pouring water
over the fire in Syria, the West and its allies have deliberately
poured petrol. In any case we don’t need lectures on morality
from those who egged on a blatantly illegal war with Iraq which
has led to the deaths of up to 1million people.

Let’s not forget that if the American uber-hawks had got their
way over Syria and Iran in 2013 we’d probably now be entering the
fifth month of World War III. The war lobby tried their hardest,
but thankfully this time they did not prevail. Let’s hope that
they don’t succeed in 2014 either.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.